Leftover Soup

Guess what today is, everybody? It's the coldest November day in Orléans since 1953. It's five degrees outside! The ground is covered with snow that melted into slush and refroze, the buses have come to screeching (and skidding) halt, and I'm wearing every sweater I have, wrapped up in every blanket I have, chain-sipping a mug of hot tea.

In other words: It's a soup day!

Fortunately, I have the perfect soup recipe. I've been making this soup once or twice a week for about a month now, but I haven't posted the recipe because it just doesn't seem like a real recipe. The ingredients change every time! Sometimes quite drastically! And I've never actually quantified any of the ingredients! But the basic structure stays the same each time, and it has never - not EVER - been a disappointment, so I felt that I had to share. Also? It tastes approximately ten times richer than it actually is. Seriously. Don't let the cream scare you away. This is an everyday kind of a soup.

I had no idea what to call this soup. Technically, it's not really leftover soup. It's "this is in my farmer's basket and I have no idea what else to do with it" soup, but since weekly baskets of fresh, organic produce are not a natural occurrence for everybody (I'm sorry. I wish they were a natural occurrence for everybody), we're going to go with Leftover Soup. Or, more precisely, White Leftover Soup.

The system is this: take whatever leftover whitish vegetables you have on hand and make soup with them. This can include - but is not limited to - any combination of: potatoes, onions, rutabaga, leeks, cabbage, parsnips, cauliflower, and celeriac*. All of those together would be spectacular. Any two of those are just fine. When I started making the soup, I thought that potatoes would have to be a staple in each one. Then I made a leek-potato-parsnip soup and realized too late that I was out of potatoes and surprise! Potatoes are not indispensable!

So: choose your whitish vegetables, in whatever portions you find them in your crisper. Peel where applicable. Chop roughly. Dump into a pot of 2-4 cups of boiling water along with a chicken or vegetable bouillon cube. Simmer until everything is tender. Let cool a bit, then puree it in small batches in a blender, food processor, or with an immersion blender. Add 3/4 cup cream or half-and-half and reheat. Salt and pepper to taste. Add some crumbled bacon if you feel fancy, or extra hungry, or just to give yourself something to chew on.

Thus far I have tried this with the following combinations, each one as delicious as the next:
potato+leek
leek+parsnip
potato+parsnip+onion
potato+onion
potato+onion+celeriac
cabbage+potato+onion
potato+cauliflower+onion+celeriac
The possibilities are truly endless.

*A note about celeriac: it is the best vegetable ever! I discovered celeriac a few weeks ago and we're still in that honeymoon phase. I think that phase is going to last. It's amazing! It's everything I love about celery, densely compacted, and purged of everything I hate about celery! Namely: it is full of that spicy, celery-like flavor but completely void of that chlorophyll taste that celery stalks have. And with no stringy fibers. And without that unpleasant explosion of water when you bite into it that makes the whole thing taste like...well, like watered-down celery. Celeriac has the wonderful celery flavor (that I spent most of my life not realizing that I liked, because it had always been nastily concealed inside a stalk of celery) in ROOT form! A root that can be stored for long periods of time, unlike wilt-happy stalks of celery! A root that is easy to peel and chop, that yeilds lovely consistent chunks of something that resembles a potato but tastes like THE BEST CELERY EVER. It can be used everywhere that celery can - except, maybe, with peanut butter, but that's a snack that's always perplexed the hell out of me, so no loss - and many places that celery can't. It's amazing in soups, it's fantastic in chicken salad, and...well, that's all I've used it for so far, but it was SO GOOD, people!

Okay. I'm done now. Go buy some celeriac!